My name is Ahan, and I have the challenge and privilege of following on from Isaac Raymond’s excellent tenure as editor of the Graduate Student Reflection Series. In order to reintroduce the series and put out a call for submissions, Isaac wrote a beautiful piece reflecting on graduate school as a narrow doorway between more stable and well-defined periods of life; as a trial by ordeal; and as the Heraclitean river, which is to say that the same graduate experience is never lived twice. Now in 2025, as I invite submissions once again, I feel the need to expound my editorial approach and how it is informed by the times in which we are living.

In the last two pieces, and in several to follow, I have deliberately sought out graduate students who either work in philosophy in conjunction with other disciplines, particularly those which society deems as being more ‘applied,’ or who came to philosophy from careers outside of the ivory tower. In the months to come, this series will be filled with stories of physicist-philosophers, soldier-philosophers, counselor-philosophers, and lawyer-philosophers. I hope their reflections will be inspiring for prospective students, thought-provoking for current ones, and joined by your unique story, dear reader. But why am I emphasizing reflections from these sorts of students in particular?

The idea of professionally pursuing a career in philosophy has never been a popular notion, never the kind of plan which assuages the fears of parents or the scorn of strangers. Everyone has their own stories: I vividly recall the selective hearing of family friends, responding to my stating of my undergraduate majors, philosophy and law, with the commendation, “Ah, law! Very nice.” I recall a time in college when, while discussing Hobbes with a friend at a cafe, a pair of Patagonia-vest-over-blue-dress-shirt middle-aged men came up to me and asked if my father made a lot of money, for I must have a cushy job lined up for me to engage in such trivia. I am sure every member of the APA has had a similar experience.

What has changed is the increasingly tumultuous and troublesome era that we are entering. For one, technological advances are changing our conceptual universe, our forms of life, and our ways of living with one another faster than we can keep up with. Philosophy has the essential task of updating our minds to our machinery, so that we may live more properly. Arguably, we haven’t fully come to grips with the philosophical problems of the 20th century—totalitarianism, consumer culture, existential risk—or even the 19th century concerns of human rights, democracy, and the death of God—as a result of which they continually manifest in current events. As we catch up to these old horizons, the 21st century brings newer ones at a rapid pace—globalization, social media, and of course, AI. 

Some of the challenges to us living well are scientific, economic, and logistic, but many of them are conceptual: they involve our ideas of, for instance, courage, truth, and justice, just as they did for Socrates. For Socrates, the discussion of these concepts depended on the context of his specific culture and time: the poetry of Homer, the rule of the Thirty Tyrants. Once concepts were arrived at, it was then essential for the philosopher to ‘return into the cave,’ and translate the Forms for the contingent society of the day. So is the case for the philosophy of right now.

Second, the dismissal that academia and philosophy have experienced in the past is turning into active cutback and decline. In the 2023 New Yorker piece “The End of the English Major,” Nathan Heller showed how the demand for a humanities education has been plummeting in the United States, while enrollments in STEM, business, law, and other ‘practical’ subjects soar. Now, if you look at relative undergraduate enrollments in philosophy specifically, they have remained relatively steady at around 0.5% throughout the twentieth century, according to analysis by Eric Schwitzgebel. This should not assuage our concerns: for with a figure like 0.5%, it may be that philosophy enrollments do not decline because there just isn’t much further for them to fall. Steady percentages are less an indication of stability and more an indication of being at the asymptote. 

Low enrollment numbers raise the additional problem that they can be used as a pretext for reforms which threaten the integrity of the departments themselves. From Indiana to Monmouth College to the University of Toledo to now, it seems, my alma mater of the University of Chicago, minimum undergraduate and graduate enrollments are directly being used in state legislation and school policy to accept smaller graduate cohorts or eliminate departments entirely. This is occurring in the context of a protracted attack on higher education by the current administration, which seeks to curtail academic freedom and expression towards ideological ends and, as a vacuous appeal to populism, gut the basic research that underlies our modern world. The academy, after all, finds its origins in the school founded by Plato; and so by attacking the disciplines which are children of philosophy, this attack is an attack on philosophy. It is an attack on expertise, which requires the examination of assumptions—the habit upon which Socrates built our way of life.

In such a moment where philosophers need to plead their own case, we often fail to mount our best defense. We might appeal to philosophy as that means by which we engage our innate sense of wonder, by which we can learn to live well. Such arguments may get people to watch a podcast, but probably aren’t enough to keep the institutions which support our work well-funded. In her piece for the New York Times, my former professor Agnes Callard goes further, admitting that even as a teacher of the humanities, she is not entirely sure of what their value consists of, and that teachers of the humanities should avoid the defensive spirit, as it requires “participants to pretend to know things that they do not actually know,” and abandon the neutrality which is necessary for rigorous inquiry.

While I agree with Callard in a purist sense, I would counter that there is good reason why Socrates had to create a city-in-speech in order to imagine the possibility of a world where philosophers could fully immerse themselves in the inquisitive spirit. As pointed out in David Snyder’s letter to the editor regarding the article, it is not just the humanities, but even the hard applied sciences that have to continually justify their work through grant applications and advocacy. And this is all from before the federal government declared open war on basic research.

Philosophy can and should mount its defense not just in terms of enrichment of the spirit but of practical societal use. George Boole’s investigations into logic allowed us to program computers. Epistemologists and metaphysicians set the stage upon which the great play of Newtonian mechanics could take place. Many of the terms and concepts used by lawyers were pioneered by moral and political theorists. As David Chalmers argues, part of the reason why philosophy does not seem to make progress may be because those parts of the discipline which become formalized then break off to form those rigorous scientific disciplines upon which modernity is built. In this era of ‘learn stoicism to unlock your productivity,’ ‘get a real job,’ and ‘ChatGPT can probably do it,’ we must defend the value of our work. 

In this spirit, I invite contributions from those who have had unorthodox paths to philosophy, or who did philosophy in conjunction with, or as a culmination of, work in those fields which directly influence our technology, our health, and our institutions. In an era of minimum enrollment requirements, let us show prospective students the myriad backgrounds from which professional philosophers can come. In the time of LLMs, let us convey those insights which cannot be produced by applying gradient descent on training data. In an age when utility is king, let us show how philosophy is integral to the functioning of society. If you are interested in contributing, please reach out. My email is [email protected].

P.S. In emphasizing these stories, I do not at all mean to discourage contributions from students who study purely philosophical topics, or who did not pivot to philosophy from a different career. In all honesty, I have sought out students in those categories in my cold emailing because those categories are the best way I can exercise my editorial vision without actually knowing the students in question. In a sense, it is easier to make philosophy relevant when it is clearly connected to the study or practice of something else—if you can do so without such a connection, all the more power to you.